Monday, April 30, 2007

I suppose we should steel ourselves for the inevitable, mind-numbing reiteration of Scotland's many virtues - I hope you'll excuse me, but if there's one subject I'm heartily sick of hearing and reading about, it's Scottish independence.

The invocations of Scotland's vast mineral wealth, its industry, its unique character - it's like being locked in a room with a coked-up real-ale bore, his mind exploding with sudden insights on the brewing process.

Sadly, I'm one of those lowlanders whose heart has never been swelled by the skirl of the pipes.

It seems to me that the Nats are setting their sights too low - nationalism is so last century. There's no grand vision here.

Aggressive imperialistic nationalism is another matter.

I'll support the Nats when they campaign on a platform for the immediate invasion and annexation of Northern England and Ireland.

Come on, it's the last thing they'll expect, and Britain is full of Scots who can act as sleeper agents. At a prearranged time, we'll rise up and sieze control of the state apparatus.

Southern England would likely resist occupation, due to a large number of Tory partisans, so it would be best to topple the government then hastily withdraw, leaving a puppet administration to maintain order.

Independence? It's for wimps. Show me your plans for the Glorious Empire of Greater Caledonia, Mr. Salmond, then we'll chat.

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Quick, somebody set a blog up for it - it'll outstrip me for original thought, if nothing else.

Still, this poses all kinds of questions about consciousness, sentience and morality.

What differences are there between a mouse and a computer that thinks it's a mouse? Could the computer be considered as intelligent as a mouse? And will it be driven insane by its unfulfilled lust for gorgonzola?

I've been thinking about this, and I've come to the conclusion that certain human behaviours could probably be rendered in code.

Yankee evangelists would be easiest, I suspect - a model of their mental process would probably look much like this...

10 SIN

20 GO TO HELL

But what of more complex creatures? Would it be possible to predict the responses of bloggers to stimuli with a simple computer program?

I think so.

Take motorcycle enthusiast Longrider for instance - in considering why today's young 'uns are crassly ignorant, bovine mummy's boys, he points the finger at a surprising suspect.

What causes such honking stupidity in kids these days? Prepare yourselves for a shock, as the culprit is none other than the Welfare State.

"This same generation has grown up with the expectation that bad things shouldn’t happen to them and if they do, then the government had better do something about it pretty sharpish. The state is mother, the state is father, the state does not lie, the state will look after us."

Let us ignore the idea that today's yoof are particularly dense, and focus on the mental process. This shouldn't be hard to render in Basic, if I cast my memory back about twenty years...

310 IF 40+ THEN GO TO 320

320 LET 18-30 = DIM

330 BACKLASH

340 NEXT BACKLASH

350 PAUSE

360 CONTINUE

370 BACKLASH

380 BACKLASH

This should be recognised as fundamentally different from the Laban Tall model of right-wing thought, which can be programmed using only three lines of code...

10 READ PAPER

20 IF SKIN = TAN THEN CLOSE BORDERS

30 GO TO 10

This could be the next wave of the future, brothers and sisters. Us mere mortal internet ranters could soon find ourselves in the BIN of history.

Friday, April 27, 2007

In entertainment news, Indian authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Richard Gere following his comical tryst with Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty.

This follows rowdy protests in which outraged Indians burned effigies of Gere, thus showing up an interesting facet of Indian society, i.e. the Indians have far too much spare time on their hands and obviously need to get jobs.

Not that I'm opposed to the prosecution of Richard Gere, of course - I think they should flog him like a disobedient pony and hang him from a lamp post. The man is a degenerate, and we're all familiar with his depravity.

You should've seen his eyes light up when he heard I called myself "rodent".

Gere's deviancy is rendered vanilla by this week's release of Zoo*, a sympathetic look at men, their animal companions and their "misunderstood barnyard love".

..."Zoo" is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a stallion."

Now, I'm not one to milk comedy milage from a man's death by misadventure, but I reckon cultural norms can be cast aside when discussing a fatality noted by the coroner as "Buggered to death by horse."

Low marks too for the New York Times, who casually underestimate the perversity of their readership...

"Art-house devotees may be a tolerant lot, but it's doubtful they want to look at a stallion's erect penis stretched across the big screen like a sailboat boom..."

Well, that's a little presumptuous. Did they ask anyone?

The usual crowd of countrified yokels are decrying the movie as evidence of coastal immorality, but none of them seem to have noticed that nobody is getting frisky with the livestock in Manhattan.

Still, this movie forms part of an unfortunate trend. As I've noted before, there's been a lot of consternation over theories that humans can catch the HIV virus from mosquitoes.

Unfortunate, but I don't have much sympathy for perverts who spend their time having bestial sex with insects.

As I publish this, I've been unable to ascertain Richard Gere's opinion on this matter. Hopefully he'll respond to the email I sent him this morning...

Dear Mr. Gere,

How's it hanging, my man?

I gather you're a zoophile and a notorious whoopsy, so I was wondering if you could give me a short comment on the subject of the movie "Zoo"?

Just a couple of lines will do, I don't want to hear your sick fantasies in detail.

Many thanks for your help, and keep away from those hamsters, you great poncing deviant.

Yours sincerely,

Flying Rodent.

I'll post his response when I get it.

*NY Times article may require registration - I've posted the full piece in comments.

Monday, April 23, 2007

I was overjoyed to hear of the death today of Boris Johnson, Member of Parliament for Henley.

Sadly, I soon realised that I'd misheard - I'm sure that you can imagine my disappointment when it became apparent that it was in fact Boris Yeltsin that had died, and not the mop-haired affront Johnson.

I was halfway through my victory dance too, a-whoopin' and a-hollerin' like a Russian oligarch in a pension fund.

Boy, did I feel foolish.

Condolences to Mr. Yeltsin's family, who should be assured that while his passing may be a shock they will find that, following some short-term instability, their lives will improve enormously thanks to his radical mortality reforms.

After a brief period of austerity, the free market will naturally fill the gap left by Mr. Yeltsin with freedom, prosperity and quite possibly magical ponies.

I can assure Mr. Yeltsin's relatives that it is very, very unlikely that their life savings will wind up in the pockets of foreign investors or criminals.

"Enjoy your street sign in Ramallah, dhimmi," she spits at Jacques Chirac, showing why she's such a handsomely recompensed cable news personality and one of the internet's most popular bloggers.

Ms. Malkin seems to believe that this summer's riots in France's banlieus are evidence of the republic's imminent destruction, and she seems quite delighted by the prospect.

Of course, the French have been mobbing, rioting and looting for at least 250 years by my count, which seems to punch a hole in her argument. If anything, the car-burning antics of the urban poor are a sign that immigrants are saluting the traditional French way of life.

Arson and pillage are as French as onion trifle and syphilis, and jolly good on them. Tony Blair and his oafish mob of twatty hall monitors wouldn't dare pull half the stunts they do if we had an ounce of the Gallic spirit.

Still, it's interesting that Michelle has so much raw hatred for the French, simply because they refused to cheer for America's disastrous war in Iraq.

Perhaps British bloggers should take note, because sooner or later our armed forces will be leaving the Americans to get on with it themselves. When they do, it's a sure thing that we'll be next to feel the sharp stabs of Ms. Malkin's poison pen.

Friday, April 20, 2007

It's often observed that traditional Left-Right politics is dead, and no wonder - when it's possible to describe Tony Blair, Trotsky and Chairman Mao as "Lefties" and still be technically correct, the term has lost its meaning.

For instance, take a look at the chart below -

Does this chart enlighten us upon the state of contemporary politics? Does it give any indication of the nuances in ideology between the great dictators and the saints of modern politics?

Does it buggery - we might as well try to read deep insights into a poorly-Photoshopped image of a Nazi hedgehog.

It seems clear to me that we need to redefine the political spectrum in a clearer form - when we have Tory leader David Cameron sheltering under the same umbrella as General Pinochet, our vocabulary is in serious need of overhaul.

I've given this matter serious thought, analysing the various trends of modern political tendencies - managerialism, monetarism, environmentalism, libertarianism etc., and I've come up with a foolproof method of categorisation.

Firstly, I was forced to turn to one of the foremost thinkers of the modern era, and I've applied the power of His rigorous intellect to the problem.

Having done so, I'm proud to offer my greatest gift to political bloggery - Mr. T's Piechart of Political Pity.

The major difficulty is that all fools will have to be brought before Mr. T for judgement, since T is famously averse to air travel. In extreme cases, such as fools too old and feeble to undertake arduous journeys towards their ultimate pitying, it may be necessary to drug Mr. T's milk and swiftly fly Him to the fool in question.

We'll need to move quickly if we are to cement Mr. T's wonderful legacy, however, as even He is not immortal, and one day shall surely come to dust.

I almost can't bear to think of the fools that will go unpitied, the lessons that will go unlearned (by fools) and the Jibba-Jabba which will go unpunished should we miss this golden opportunity.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

I'm a man of many vices, and I have little time for moralists objecting to my depravity.

"Is that your sixth pint?" asked a troublesome co-worker, whilst in the pub recently. "Jesus, why do you have to drink so much?"To which I was forced to respond, well, drugs are expensive and difficult to come by. Also, I don't have to drink - I can stop whenever I like.

"About one in five people arrested is a heroin addict...There has been a 111% rise in the number of people jailed for all drug-related offences between 1994 and 2005.

However, street prices have dropped - with heroin falling from £70 a gram in 2000 to £54 in 2005."The politicians and the people have been jerking each others' law enforcement fantasies over drug laws for as long as I can remember.

"Drugs can lead to addiction, psychosis and death," our teachers intoned at us in sonorous tones of mighty gravitas, totally bumming our highs. "Yeah, right on daddy-o," we used to say. "You got a twenty I could borrow?."And still, we find that most of our serious crime is being committed by a small core of serious addicts.

Since we've tried the draconian approach, the very draconian approach and the very, very draconian approach to drugs, I thought I might offer some suggestions that might actually work...Legalise Drugs For The Employed - Anyone who has a job can take whatever they like, provided they show up at work in a fit state. I can't think of any other incentive to get our unemployable underclass motivated towards gainful employment.

Compulsory Scientology - State-sponsored religion.

Christian Advertising Campaigns - Stress that 70% of people in the Lake of Fire are there on drugs charges.

Sharia Law - Behead some sense into those kids.

Coked-Up Stock-Brokers To Lecture Kids On How Drugs Boost Dividends And Help You Close Kick-Ass Deals - Terrify the little beggars with cautionary tales.Stoned Teachers Bring Guitars To Class, Sing-a-Longs To "Give Peace A Chance"Branding With Hot IronsOzzy Osbourne To Drive School Bus - Rendition of "Ironman" compulsory.

And those are just the ones I thought sounded sensible, so you can imagine how baked I am right now.

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Guns Don't Kill People......Bullets Do.By Bruce HeffernanAtlanta Journal-Constitution, 17th April 2007In times of national crisis, it's a natural reaction to reach for comforting answers. When horrible things happen, it's all too easy to lash out at the wrong target and compound the tragedy; to throw out the baby with the bath-water.It's at these times that we need to stand firm, clinging to our core beliefs. It's when we're faced with a motiveless multiple shooting that we need to speak out clearly and bravely, and declare that guns don't kill people - bullets kill people.In the passion of the moment, it's easy to fall prey to the simple nostrums of those who seek to take away that which forms the very cornerstone of our identity - harmless mechanical devices that, if used for the purpose their manufacturers intended, can propel lethal projectiles at incredible velocities into human bodies.The argument that guns are to blame for many thousands of unnecessary deaths in the last decade is facile and easily disproved - no-one has ever choked to death upon a pistol, nor has anybody ever accidentally decapitated himself with the stock of a shotgun.Guns are perfectly harmless in the hands of law-abiding citizens who keep them locked securely away. It is only when irresponsible people use their firearms to expel white hot slugs of metal at potentially harmful speeds that they become problematic.And let us not be unduly harsh upon the humble bullet - often, the bullet is entirely blameless, and the true killer is blood poisoning, or a stray splinter of bone that pierces a vital organ.Let us not be so hasty to give up our freedom in the face of adversity. Only our eternal vigilance can ensure our firearms stay where they belong - out of the hands of children, in locked drawers and cabinets.(Many apologies to the Onion, as usual...)

I usually try to restrict myself to gags and dirty jokes, but yesterday's massacre in Virginia has got me thinking. Being a Scotsman, I don't like to analyse the Americans' problems for them, but it strikes me that the rage massacre is not a peculiarly American problem.

What's baffling me today is that I so rarely see my opinions reflected in the press.

See, I've had a good look around at the reaction to the latest campus shooting, and yet again it's like this is the first time this has ever happened. "This is so unexpected," I've heard more than once.

As the blame game commences, the same talking points are reiterated- "we should ban guns","If only the students had been armed", "what were the cops thinking?", "Hollywood is to blame...", "At the end of the day, Evil is to blame..."The press will shake their collective heads, the bloggers will carry water for their various interests, and they'll all conclude that this was an incomprehensible tragedy.

And next year, a well-educated middle-class kid with little history of violence or mental illness will walk into his school and the same thing will happen again.

The problem is that in putting the blame on guns and "Evil", we're fooling ourselves. The real question should be, "Where is all this rage coming from?"

It's easy to forget, but the rage murder is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one that is far more common in America than elsewhere - while there were massacres in the past, they only became commonplace with the post office shootings of the 1980's. From there they spread to schools and colleges.

Forty years ago, it was almost unheard of for middle-class people to snap and murder their peers and colleagues - now, it's treated as a force of nature, as inevitable and unstoppable as tsunamis and earthquakes.

We won't be asking what it is about western society that causes suicidal acts of demonstrative violence - nobody will draw a connection between the shock-horror coverage of this incident and its cause.

I absolutely guarantee that anybody drawing a link between this massacre and horrifying acts of nihilistic murder like the London underground bombings will be shouted down in a storm of anger, when it seems to me that they spring from a common root.

Alas, we'll have to wait for posterity to shed light upon this savage aspect of our culture. Perhaps we need that removal from our society in order to look at it dispassionately and ask the question that we should all be asking today -

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Sunday evening, and what better way to spend it than with a Friends marathon? So I rented a set of DVDs featuring America's best-loved twenty-something couch-dwellers, and they were as heart-warming as ever.

First up, it was the one where Ross and Chandler attempt to fix Phoebe's washing machine, and wind up doing her from both ends on the kitchen table.

Then it was the one where Joey walks in to find Monica and Rachel at it like knives on the divan, then hilarious hi-jinks and hot steamy action ensue.

That's my favourite one, even better than the episode where one of them was pregnant, the one with the dwarf and the neck-massager.

I was just surprised at the racy dialogue - I'm sure I remember it as a family show, but it was all "Suck my this" and "Lick my that", and "Eff my Effing C, you big Effer."

I'm not a prude, but kids could be watching, for God's sake.

Not that I'm a stranger to deviancy, but I try to keep my unpleasant urges to myself.

For instance, I have a thing about bottoms, but I don't trouble Mrs. Rodent with it - I just sit on my arse until it goes numb, then it feels like I'm groping someone else.

And as I was saying to Clairwil the other day, I'm far too miserly to pay for phonesex. I usually just call up the Samaritans and threaten to kill myself unless they talk dirty to me.

It saves me a fortune.

Well, consider yourselves warned before you go renting out your old favourites - your memory isn't always as reliable as you might think.

That evening in with He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe might throw up more surprises than you'd expect.

Friday, April 13, 2007

British National Party Scotland's spokesman was just on TV giving his party political broadcast for the Scottish Parliament elections, portraying our beloved country as an open sewer of crime, horror and degradation.

I won't be voting for extreme nationalists and racists, however - I find their hatred of immigrants repellent and I am implacably opposed to their small-minded xenophobia.

Plus, their spokesman was some kind of Orkney-dwelling, island-monkey teuchter, and I'll be fucked if I'm voting for some sheep-shagging Norwegian to sit in my elected legislature.

Fucking rock-hoppers - they should send them all back to Shetland where they belong.

John Bitches tells me that bloggers are being urged to sign up to a code of ethics, under which we agree to write in a civil, truthful and polite fashion.

Well, I don't need to sign any petition to ensure my good behaviour - I'm an unfailingly pleasant chap, and I've never knowingly allowed a lie to pass my lips.

I was saying just that to Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos fame just the other day, I said "Markos, I always treat my fellow man with the utmost respect and would never tell a falsehood. My whole life has been a campaign for truth and justice."

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

As if the West has not inflicted enough misery upon Iraq, as if her sons and daughters have not suffered enough at our grasping, sunburnt hands, the British Army has chosen to deliver the final insult.

Not content with pillage, murder and terror, the military is now indoctrinating the children of Iraq in our barbarous ways.

"Brigadier James Everard CBE, Commander of 20th Armoured Brigade, said: "As a military commander in southern Iraq I had never dreamt that cricket would help to form a bridge between our two cultures so successfully."

Is there no torture too vile, no horror too horrific, no depth to which we will not sink?

Friday, April 06, 2007

It's one of the most commonly asked questions in modern politics, but one that is worth revisiting often - whatever happened to the Lift?

While the nation has changed radically due to globalisation, privatisation and streamlined capitalism, the Lift has been unable to advance. It remains trapped, capable of rising and falling, but never of going forward.

The problem is plain to see - the Lift lacks inclusiveness, with little room for manoeuvre within its narrow confines. One could wait expectantly for decades for an innovative suggestion, but the Lift has nothing to offer but the same simplistic formulations that it has offered since Attlee was a boy.

If anyone had been doubtful of the Lift's irrelevance, its abject indifference to the rise of radical Islamism surely confirmed our most dire suspicions. While thousands perished at the hands of totalitarians, the Lift remained stuck between floors, mindful only of the need for maintenance.

So what can be done to reinvigorate the Lift? The answer can only come from the Lift itself, and the prognosis is not good - for as long as it continues to serve only those within its cold embrace rather than offering a coherent vision to society, it will remain irrelevant to the majority of humanity.

(F.R. - Will this do? This is my first stab at writing for Democratiya, so I can edit it if you like.)

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

"I'd like to say that myself and my whole team are very grateful for your forgiveness. I'd like to thank yourself and the Iranian people... Thank you very much, sir."

-Unidentified British crew member, to Iranian President and Mentalist Ahmadinejad

Like all the other rock-hard motherfuckers currently criticising our sailors' craven conduct, I've fought in over seventeen wars, and took fourteen bullet wounds at the closing of the Falaise pocket. I was lucky to escape the Battle of Teutoberg Forest with only superficial injuries and a nasty axe-hole.

As you can imagine, I've seen some grovelling in my time, and our boys and girls were far less obsequious than I would've been in their situation.

"I'd crawl over a forest of Iranian bell-ends just to kiss your glorious hoop, O magnificent one," that's what I'd have said. "Your evil teddy bear appearance is like the radiance of a thousand suns, suns made of chocolate tits filled with champagne."

And to think, after all these many years of British military endeavour, we have arrived at this ignominious moment.

Did Douglas Bader throw himself upon the mercy of his fascist captors? Did the POWs of Colditz have to debase themselves, urinating in fear before the might of the Wehrmacht?

No, the Nazis were quite content with a bit of light bondage and spanking, pretty vanilla by the standards of the era.

So I'm launching a competition - what's the most vainglorious peice of keyboard heroism you've seen relating to this incident?

I've learned tonight that a leading light of British bloggery has been subjected to a constant stalking campaign, and that the long arm of the law has finally intervened.

Stalking is one of the most hateful of all public order crimes and it can have terrible effects for victims. To be deprived of one's peace of mind by a prolonged campaign of harrassment and intimidation is to be deprived of one's freedom, and to be subjected to such treatment merely for blogging is despicable.

In that vein, here's my list of the Top Ten Bloggers I'd Most Like To Stalk -

Please don't feel offended if I've missed you out, I'll get round to lurking in cyberspace while rifling through your virtual rubbish eventually.

It's never amusing to mock the mentally unstable, but sometimes I feel that we've taken political correctness too far in the opposite direction.

My boss has a sign on his desk saying "You don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps!".Outrageous - I'd always been led to believe that positive discrimination was illegal in the UK. Such displays of nepotism are disgusting in the modern era.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Comedy hatemonger Charles Johnson finds his wildest fantasies fulfilled by Democratic house speaker Nancy Pelosi's decision to wear a headscarf when visiting a mosque in Syria.

No doubt the stoat-brained oaf would've been more impressed had Pelosi arrived clad only in Doc Martens and a smile, and chosen to demonstrate her respect for local customs by pissing noisily into the collection plate...

"She is a Death-worshipping hag, a traitor to all mankind," opines a commenter who should probably get out more.

I understand the sentiment, since I never respect local cultures myself. When I was last in Boston I spent my time braying like Prince Harry on nitrous oxide, calling loudly for the subjugation of the Irish and snorting derisively when addressed by Americans.

True to form, they beat me with bats and left me to die in a dumpster.

When I was in India, I beat the cows with sticks, affected a cringe-worthy Pete Postlethwaite in The Usual Suspects accent and insisted on riding inside the train.

I damn near got burnt upon someone else's husband's funeral pyre for that.

And when I spent my time in Australia getting smashed on lager, urinating on the fruit machines and grabbing the barmaids by the tits, the Aussies pronounced me a thoroughly good bloke and joined in enthusiastically.

As for Charles and his Merry Band of Bumlickers, it pains me to see their Cassandra-like agonies. Every moment must be a torment for the poor dears. To think, they'll never receive anything but abuse for their fierce opposition to medievalism.

If we carted them off to Summerisle and burned them all in a giant wicker cock, we'd really be doing them a favour.

Currently pulling in major traffic from the big-hitting blowhards of American bloggery, 18 Doughty Street's Tim Montgomerie laments Britain's feeble response to the Iranians' continued violations of international law.

The entire piece is presented as a negative comparison to the days when Margaret Thatcher sent our boys to whip the Argentinian Junta over the Falkland Islands, as opposed to to today's timid, near-pacifist Prime Minister.

Tim makes some good, if rather obvious, points about military overstretch and the negative impact of the Iraq disaster on British leverage, but then veers off into boilerplate bashing of the UN and the BBC, not to mention odd lamentations over the weakness of our relations with America.

The most amusing part is when he alleges that Britain's weakness is the result of appeasing terrorism at home and abroad...

"Although the situation is beginning to improve from the darkest days of 'Londonistan', the British authorities have for many years tended to encourage extremism by only dealing with the more extremist 'representatives' of Britain's Muslims..."

If only we'd had Maggie watching our backs, she'd have sorted these evil extremists out before you could say "privatisation"!

"(Afghan 'freedom fighter' Abdul Haq) ...met Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan several times. I remember one night having dinner with him when he regaled us with jokes about his tour of 10 Downing Street and the antics of Thatcher's officials. He told her repeatedly to give him more weapons..."

And if you'll forgive a lengthy quote...

"Thus, after September 11th 2001, Margaret Thatcher chided British Muslim leaders for not having been sufficiently robust in their condemnation of Afghan terrorism. 'Passengers on those planes were told they were going to die and there were children on board,' she raged. 'They must say that is disgraceful...'

"In 1986 she (Thatcher) had invited the young Afghan resistance leader Abdul Haq to fly to London at the British taxpayers' expense and be entertained in Downing Street. Haq was a self-confessed terrorist who in September 1984 had planted a bomb at Kabul airport, killing twenty-eight people - most of them schoolchildren who were preparing to fly to Moscow. His purpose, he explained, was 'to warn people not to send their children to the Soviet Union;. He also defended the firing of long-range rockets at Kabul, which had killed many civilians and children.

'We use poor rockets, we cannot control them,' he shrugged. 'They sometimes miss. I don't care... if I kill 50 civilians'."

'Did Thatcher... rebuke Haq for his 'disgraceful' callousness? Far from it: she exhorted him to persevere with 'one of the most heroic resistance struggles known to history.'"

It would be possible to explore Mrs. T's relationship with the Afghan resistance against Soviet occupation further, but I think this taster is quite enough. Suffice to say that Maggie's idea of what constitutes a terrorist might be slightly different to mine.

I mention this purely because I expect we're going to hear many a partisan cry "If only the Iron Lady was here to bash the Persians!" in the next few days, and it never hurts to revisit interesting moments in history.

I'm not even going to tackle comparisons between the Falklands War and potential fisticuffs with Iran - if we're going by the simplistic definition of military victory as being in control of the battlefield at the end of hostilities... well, see below.

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Our old pal at the Devil's Kitchen latches on to a popular undercurrent in political debate and asks "Has Democracy failed?"

"Sort of," seems to be the consensus amongst bloggers, but all agree that something is badly awry, and the hunt for responsible miscreants commences.

In seeking an explanation for our miserable voter apathy, the old Devil finds one perpetrator sitting in the corner looking more guilty than a puppy sitting next to a puddle of piss - the Welfare State.

It's a possible explanation for the degraded state of political discourse in the UK, but with all due respect to him, I suspect that the Devil could easily find the liver-spotted hand of socialism responsible for noisy kids in the cinema, harsh winters and erectile dysfunction.

Mind you, it could be worse - A Very British Dude suggests that the only solution is to deny the vote to Civil Servants, since they're state employees and will vote in their own interests.

"In short, those who pay the piper should call the tune. Those in the pay of the state should have no say in how it is run."

I'll assume that VBD is joking, but I can see where he's coming from. I was a Civil Servant for years, and we used to love election times - the Ministers would jet up from Westminster to share their personal drug stashes and offer each of us our own weight in oral sex.

Personally, I was offended by John Prescott's parsimony with his cocaine, and duly cast my vote for the Liberal Democrats. You'd need a ski-lift to get to the top of the lines Menzies Campbell chops out.

We're all aware of the villainy of Civil Servants, of course. Since "Yes, Minister" thoroughly debunked the notion that anyone could work in the public sector for anything other than avarice and personal gain, it's common knowledge that they spend their days playing ping-pong and dialling phonesex.

I saw the light after reading right-wing blogs, and decided to take a career move sideways into gay porn. I may spend my days being bummed ragged by huge hairy men, degrading myself from every possible angle, but at least I can look at myself in the mirror at the end of the day.

Every time the director shouts "Action!" and I bend over to grab my ankles, I feel an immense swell of pride and dignity*, knowing that I'm not taking the sweat from the brow of Britain's hard-working small businessman.

So I think there's a lot of merit in denying the vote to Civil Servants. Speaking as someone who worked in the court system, punching rivets into the production line of tower block-dwelling illiterates on their eternal procession to HMP Saughton, I'd have gladly ceded my vote to a cab driver, a shopkeeper or an IT consultant.

After all, there's nothing I could possibly learn in five years working in the criminal justice system that the average member of the public couldn't work out with the application of good old British common sense.

I'd just have voted for the MP most highly-skilled in the art of fellatio anyway.